This invention relates to the field of prefabricated buildings. More specifically, it relates to the provision of prefabricated building components for the construction and assembly of residential and commercial type buildings. It has long been desired to prefabricate buildings so that the economies of assembly line manufacture can be obtained as compared to the high labor cost involved with custom constructed buildings. Many prefabricated building components have been proposed and, indeed, some have found a reasonable measure of success as, for example, the all metal buildings currently being marketed for commercial purposes.
Principal drawbacks of currently available prefabricated building components include their high cost, lack of rigidity, and particularly important under present circumstances, their lack of insulating capability. Metal buildings, for example, are notorious heat wasters and provide only limited possibilities for the provision of additional insulation to reduce the cost of heating such structures.
It is accordingly desirable to provide improved building components from which houses and commercial structures may be formed which are low in cost, easily fabricated in a factory and transported to the construction site and which have excellent thermal retention characteristics. According to the present invention, building components having these desirable characteristics are disclosed.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide building components which provide necessary structural rigidity and load bearing capacity but which are low in cost and may be prefabricated.
A further object of the invention is to provide improved building components which have excellent thermal insulating properties and thus require little or no additional thermal insulation be added during on site assembly.
A further object of the invention is the provision of prefabricated building components which can readily accommodate windows, doors and other special details.
Another object of the invention is to provide lightweight building components formed from reinforced steel columns and lightweight rigid insulation.
Other objects and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the remaining portion of the specification.